It's a Hard-Knock Life

Tuesday night was my first visit to Crow's Theatre at Dundas and Carlaw, one of the few theatres in the East End. It was a spacious space, complete with a bar/music stage. It was good to see a main-floor tenant of a condo other than a pharmacy or a bank. The theatre area was also a good size and can seat several hundred people. Tonight was the 1st night (preview) of George F. Walker's Orphans for the Czar, a title appropriate for our times.

We were back in Tsar-ist Russia, where two orphans Vasley (Paolo Santalucia) and Rayisha (Shayla Brown) eked out poor, "peasant" lives. Rayisha was still hopeful but Vasley thought her blindness shielded her from the reality that there was nothing beautiful in the world. He was then sent to Petersburg to live with a book-seller only known as Master (Eric Peterson).

The living situation for the masses there wasn't any better. Revolution was in the air and in the thoughts two frequent visitors to the bookshop: bourgeois sisters Olga (Michelle Mohammed) and Maya (Shawna Thompson). Meanwhile, Makarov (Patrick McManus) managed a network of Czarist spies including violent henchman Sasha (Kyle Gatehouse). It was clear to them that people who read books full of foreign ideas needed a close watch.

Vasley spent his days catering to the whims of Master and supplying him with young women, and after being beaten by Sasha, spying for Makarov. Another villager Yakov (Christopher Allen), who had later also brought Rayisha to the city, worked in a factory full of subversive dissidents. Then everything exploded (literally).

It was an interesting play with parallels to our current times between people fomenting unrests and government crackdowns. Back then though, it was clearer who was the "bad guy" when it came to the people vs the elites. The language was in modern vernacular (which often elicited laughs) but characters sometimes spoke dialectically to each other which I bounced off hard.

Side note: I walked through various laneways to get to the Theatre and passed by an old, fenced-in Jewish cemetery (Holy Blossom) behind a rec centre. On the way back, I mostly walked down Dundas St. E. Between Bermount and Jones, I saw something I've never seen in Toronto. The houses had their backyard and garage facing the street (their entrances were on side streets) as opposed to being tucked behind them in garage lanes. So that block of Dundas felt hostile with a suburban-through-street feel since there were no "housing", just fences and garage doors.